Brain Rules by John Medina

Exercise
Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.
o Our brains were built for walking 12 miles a
day!
o To improve your skills, move.
o Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it
glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the
toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates
the protein that keeps neurons connecting.
o Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your
risk of general dementia. It cuts your risk of
Alzheimers by 60 percent.

Survival
Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.
o We dont have one brain in our heads; we have
three. We started with a lizard brain to keep us
breathing, then added a brain like a cats, and
then topped those with the thin layer of Jell-O as
the cortex the third, and powerful, human
brain.
 o We took over the Earth by adapting to change
itself, after we were forced from the trees to the
savannah when climate swings disrupted our
food supply.
o Going from four legs to two to walk on the
savannah freed up energy to develop a complex
brain.
o Symbolic reasoning is a uniquely human talent. It
may have arisen from our need to understand
one anothers intentions and motivations,
allowing us to coordinate within a group.

Wiring
Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently
What you do and learn in life physically changes what
your brain looks like it literally rewires it.
The various regions of the brain develop at different
rates in different people.
No two peoples brains store the same information in
the same way in the same place.
 We have a great number of ways of being intelligent,
many of which dont show up on IQ tests.

Attention
Rule #4: We dont pay attention to boring things.
The brains attentional spotlight can focus on only
one thing at a time: no multitasking.
We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting the
meaning of an event than we are at recording detail.
Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.
Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can
keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating
events rich in emotion.

Short-term memory
Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
 The brain has many types of memory systems. One
type follows four stages of processing: encoding, storing,
retrieving, and forgetting.
Information coming into your brain is immediately split
into fragments that are sent to different regions of the
cortex for storage.
Most of the events that predict whether something
learned also will be remembered occur in the first few
seconds of learning. The more elaborately we encode a
memory during its initial moments, the stronger it will be.
You can improve your chances of remembering
something if you reproduce the environment in which you
first put it into your brain.
Long-term memory
Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
Most memories disappear within minutes, but those
that survive the fragile period strengthen with time.
Long-term memories are formed in a two-way
conversation between the hippocampus and the cortex,
until the hippocampus breaks the connection and the
memory is fixed in the cortex which can take years.
 Our brains give us only an approximate view of
reality, because they mix new knowledge with past
memories and store them together as one.
The way to make long-term memory more reliable is
to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in
timed intervals.

Sleep
Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.
The brain is in a constant state of tension between
cells and chemicals that try to put you to sleep and cells
and chemicals that try to keep you awake.
The neurons of your brain show vigorous rhythmical
activity when youre asleep - perhaps replaying what you
learned that day.
People vary in how much sleep they need and when
they prefer to get it, but the biological drive for an
afternoon nap is universal.
Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function,
working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical
reasoning, and even motor dexterity.
Stress
Rule #8: Stressed brains dont learn the same
way.
Your bodys defense system the release of
adrenaline and cortisol is built for an immediate
response to a serious but passing danger, such as saber-
toothed tiger. Chronic stress, such as hostility at home,
dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with
short-term responses.
Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your
blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke, and
cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus, crippling
your ability to learn and remember.
Individually, the worst kind of stress is the feeling that
you have no control over the problem you are helpless.
Emotional stress has huge impacts across society, on
childrens ability to learn in school and on employees
productivity at work.

Sensory integration
Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.
We absorb information about an event through our
senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight,
others from sound, etc) disperse those signals to separate
parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened,
eventually perceiving the event as a whole.
The brain seems to rely partly on past experience in
deciding how to combine these signals, so two people can
perceive the same event very differently.
Our senses evolved to work together vision
influencing hearing, for example which means that we
learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.
Smells have an unusual power to bring back
memories, maybe because smell signals bypass the
thalamus and head straight to their destinations, which
include that supervisor of emotions known as the
amygdala.

Vision
Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up
half of our brains resources.
What we see is only what our brain tells us we see,
and its not 100 percent accurate.
The visual analysis we do has many steps. The retina
assembles photons into little movie-like streams, some
areas registering motion, others registering color, etc.
Finally, we combine that information back together so we
can see.
We learn and remember best through pictures, not
through written or spoken words.

Gender
Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
The X chromosome that males have one of and
females have two of though one acts as a backup is a
cognitive hot spot, carrying an unusually large
percentage of genes involved in brain manufactures.
Women are genetically more complex, because the
active X chromosomes in their cells are a mix of Moms
and Dads. Mens X chromosomes all come from Mom,
and their Y chromosome carries less than 100 genes,
compared with about 1,500 for the X chromosome.
Mens and womens brains are different structurally
and biochemically men have bigger amygdala and
produce serotonin faster, for examples but we dont
know if those differences have significance.
Men and women respond differently to acute stress:
Women activate the left hemispheres amygdala and
remember emotional details. Men use the right amygdala
and get the gist.

Exploration
Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.
Babies are the model of how we learn not by
passive reaction to the environment but by active testing
through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and
conclusion.
Specific parts of the brain allow this scientific
approach. The right prefrontal cortex looks for errors in our
hypothesis (The saber-toothed tiger is not harmless),
and an adjoining region tells us to change behavior
(Run!).
 We can recognize and imitate behavior because of
mirror neurons scattered across the brain.
Some parts of our adult brains stay as malleable as a
babys, so we can create neurons and learn new things
throughout our lives.

Detailed notes
Chapter 1 - exercise
We moved.
Direct correlation between exercise and mental alertness.
Predictor of successful aging is the presence or absence
of sedentary lifestyle
Lifetime of exercise result in elevation of cognitive
performance
Physical activity is cognitive candy.

Chapter 2 survival
Brain appears to be designed to: 1) solve problems 2)
related to surviving 3) in an unstable outdoor environment
4) to do so in nearly constant motion
Two ways to beat the cruelty of the environment: 1)
become stronger 2) become smarter

See Dual Representational Theory by DeLoache

we are human beings because we can fantasize

Symbolic reasoning is a handy gadget

Re-read later